Franziska: Hi there and welcome back! Yesterday I was running a session, a branding session for an accelerator in Vancouver. And I had some really great questions at the end, there were some great startups as part of the program, and one of the questions that was asked at the end was whether the business needs a dot-com URL, or if they can use another URL, because it can be quite tricky to find a great business name that you can still take the dot-com, where the dot-com is still available, so here is my answer. The first part of the answer is that it depends on your goals. It depends on where you’re heading with this business and the two questions that really matter here are where are your customers, and are you thinking about taking this business global. So if you have a business, maybe a small business and you know that all you will focus on is one country, let’s say Australia, or the UK, or Switzerland or Sweden, then if you just take the country URL, so .com.au for Australia, .co.uk or .ch for Switzerland, that’s usually quite okay if only the country one is available, if you think that you’re only going to stay in that country. If you think that you’re going to go global, then I would definitely see if you can get a dot-com. So dot-com is generally… unless you are staying local only with your customer base, generally, a dot com is preferable, it also is often a little bit more trustworthy and feels safer. The perception is that it’s safer and not that it is, but the perception that audience members have is that it’s a bit safer than for example a .net, so if you see a .net versus .com, usually you probably also, I definitely have that perception is that “ah, .com just feels a little bit… a bit more established and a bit more professional”. Also, if you can get the .com, it’s a great asset, if your exit plan is to sell, for example, having the dot-com URL is definitely quite a great asset to have. And the other thing to consider is that you don’t want to drive traffic to someone else. If somebody else has a dot-com and you have the .com.au for example, you don’t want to then drive traffic to someone else especially, so double-check that the person that owns the dot-com is not a direct competitor because then you’re suddenly if you’re doing really great advertising, and marketing, and traffic, driving activities, you don’t want to drive traffic to the wrong business. So check that. Also, check that the person who has the dot-com, make sure that they don’t have their business name because it would be the same as yours, probably trademarked, because if they have a trademark, especially in your country, they can come and tell you that you can’t use that name. So just double-check all those spaces. Now, there are actually also more URL options coming out, so there’s a new one coming for Australia, just .au, rather than .com.au, there are lots of other options that you can also, use so given the questions that I’ve shared with you, then decide. Now if you have answered these questions and you say I really want to get the .com which is understandable for all of our businesses that we have, we also have the .com so just to give you a bit of transparency, but again it’s not 100 necessary if you are focusing on one country only for example. Now, what are the options if the dot-com is already taken. So one thing you can try to do; there are a few options… the first one is you can try and buy it, depending on whether the url is used by someone or it’s just sitting there by someone who wants to make money from selling it, you can try and buy it. And a good website to look who owns the domain is whois.com so w-h-o-i-s, whois.com. If you go to that website, you can type in the URL and it generally shows you who owns that domain and then you can start negotiating. And the emphasis here is on negotiating. So when we… actually, one of our businesses, Ocean Lovers, oceanlovers.com was not available. Somebody else owned it and so I went to this website, this is maybe five, six years ago; went to this website and found who owns the URL, .com, and started negotiating. And just a little behind the scenes here, the negotiations started at 40,000 US dollars to own oceanlovers.com. Took me a few months to negotiate with this person that wanted forty thousand, negotiating forth and back. forth and back, and we finally landed on I believe 7,000 USD back then and that was okay, for I mean that’s still a quite decent investment for us here for the goals that we have for Ocean Lovers, it was a good investment, because it’s a great asset and especially because we are targeting not just Australia, but different countries around the world with our sustainable surfwear. So that’s the first thing, is you can try and buy. Make sure you negotiate. Number two is you can, as I mentioned before, you can use other URLs, as I mentioned, but if that’s not an option, then number three is you can add a word to your URL, so given that there’s no competitor that has protected your name, you could probably add another word like for example if it’s an e-commerce business you can add shop, so we could say I’ll give you the example of Ocean Lovers, so you could go oceanloversshop.com for example, or you could add a word beforehand if that works for you, so for us, it could be reuniteoceanlovers —probably people can’t spell, it so it’s not that good, but you get the gist, so you can either add a word before or a word after. Or you can come up, Number 4, the last option is you can come up with a slightly different spelling of the name, but, that’s a tricky one because you don’t want to be too clever. There are lots of people that use URLs that they have to spell out every time because it’s too clever or the spelling is wrong and then people have to keep spelling word by word, letter by letter to be able to write it, so don’t make your URL something that you have to constantly spell it, if your name, your brand name, or your URL name is something that people will go, “excuse me can you spell that?”, it’s not that good. You want it to be something that is easily spelt and not misspelled too much. So those are your options, so long story short, do I need the dot-com? Depends on your exit plans, on your goals, on your objectives, and if you do need it, then these are your options that I’ve just shared with you below so hopefully, this is helpful and feel free to share this with anyone else who is in this pickle of “oh I really want it or need it, but it’s already taken,” maybe they can take some tips away from this tip here. Thanks again for tuning in and I can’t wait to see you next time.